What is your position on this puppy narcotics training program being promoted by the Texas Police Canine Association?

There are two ways to look at this puppy training program. One from the dogs standpoint and the second from a legal standpoint. First I will explain what the program is (as I know it).

There is a man in Texas (named Bill Grimmer - he is a Canadian citizen) that does contract work for the Tarrant County Police Academy. This is a state funded school that certifies police officers. Mr. Grimmer has helped design a program (which I have been told is funded by a grant from the Governors Drug Task force) to run a training program where they give 8 week old puppies to new police K-9 officer. These officers come in for several weeks of training to learn how to imprint the smell of narcotics on their puppies. They begin with marijuana. After a couple of weeks they take their puppy home and do their own training.

After a few months of home training these puppies are brought back and certified as narcotics detection dogs. The main organization certifying the pups is the Texas Police K-9 Association, (but Mr. Grimmer told me that they will certify a dog to any standard as long as there is not an age requirement because they like to certify puppies). Mr. Grimmer indicated that they also certify dogs under the NNDDA and USPCA standard, but the Texas K-9 is their main organization that is used for certification. I recently got an e-mail from one of these handlers who indicated that he certified his 14 week old puppy in marijuana by the Texas Police K-9 Association. This individual was a strong believer in this program.

I take an opposite position. On one hand I believe strongly in early puppy training. I have produced a training video titled Bite Training Puppies. This tape shows how to imprint bite work on 8 week old puppies. What it does not do is try and tell you that at 14 weeks of age you will have a certified patrol dog.

I do not believe that a 14, 16 or 20 week old puppy should be certified as a working street narcotics dog. Granted the people who have gone through this program can put up some big numbers on drugs and cash they have seized. My response to this would be "Tell me the other part of the story." The fact is their puppies can find drugs in training and even sometimes on the street during real searches. I will not argue that fact. But if the puppies are only partially trained (which I feel these puppies are) then this program is seriously flawed. All puppies deal with the stress differently than adult dogs. No one needs to be an animal psychologist to understand this fact. Training regimented search patterns is stressful to a dog. Teaching proofing exercises is also stressful to a dog. Expecting a puppy to deal with the pressures related to normal pattern training and distraction training in narcotics work is foolish.

Expecting a puppy to deal with the stress of normal daily training, search warrants and vehicle searches that an adult narcotics detection dog is expected to go through is crazy. They simply can not do it at the same level as a fully trained adult dog. Therefore it is my contention that it is impossible to have a fully trained narcotics detection dog that is only 14 weeks of age.

Every professional with any common sense will tell you that a dog must have a certain degree of maturity before it is able to properly deal with the stress of advanced training. All dog training is similar in this respect. Dogs go through 3 distinct phases in a training program.

• First they are taught a basic command or exercise motivationally (either for a toy or a piece of food or praise).
• Once the dog knows and understands the exercise he is exposed to the "correction phase of training." This is where the dog is corrected when he refuses to perform a command that we know he already knows.
• The final phase of training is "the proofing phase" where the dog is exposed to higher and higher levels of distractions and corrected for not performing the command.

Narcotics training is no different than obedience training or protection training. Puppies can be taught the basic skills during the early imprinting and motivational stages of training. But they need to be more mature to deal with the correction phase or the distraction phase. If a dog is certified to go on the street as a puppy, before it has gone through proper training it can not and should not be called a certified narcotics detection dog.

I offer a different example of this concept by comparing it to bite work. We can teach a puppy the skills of bite work during early prey drive work, but we can not expect that same puppy to be a true protection dog until it is mature enough to deal with the stress of defensive work. I would also offer the comparison of teaching an 8 year old boy to shoot a "BB" gun. We would not expect that same child to defend his home against adult intruders. So just because we can teach a puppy to identify the odor of a narcotic does not mean that same puppy can handle the stress involved in the rest of the work.

If this Texas program started puppies at 8 weeks of age and continued the motivational training throughout the first year of the dogs life and then when that dog started to mature, introduced it to search pattern, distractions and proofing at 12 or 13 months of age, they could have some of the best drug dogs in the country. But as it stands now, that's not how it works. They are certifying a 14 week old puppy as a working street dog and to me this is just plain foolish. My personal feeling is that Marcus Cook (the President of the Texas Police Dog Association) is more concerned with his image and his organization than he is with the program.

Then there is also the legal issue to this matter. If I train a drug dog, that dog needs to have excellent training and it must be accompanied by detailed training records. These records need to reflect the number of finds the dog has made, the number of finds the dog has missed, the number of false indications the dog has made in training and how that dog works under distractions and proofing exercises. If a dog is too immature to deal with searches under distraction (and proofing) then that dog is only partially trained. If a dog can be shown to be only partially trained how can that dog be used as "probable cause" in a search and seizure situation? The answer is "They can't be used for probable cause." They may rise to the level of "reasonable suspicion," but not "probable cause." Reasonable suspicion does not legally get you into a vehicle to search it.

I would say that these puppies could be used to search for drugs in a warrant or vehicle as long as the puppies indication was only used to find dope and not used to get the warrant or as "probable cause" to enter the vehicle to perform the search.

If a puppies indication was used to obtain a search warrant or his indication was used to develop "probable cause," then the people involved in the searches by these puppies could possibly have civil rights violations. In addition the departments that the dog handlers work for may have a liability problem due to negligent training and supervision. There could be a case made that any reasonable supervisor should have been aware of the fact that a puppy does not have the ability to be certified to a level of being used in probable cause situations. This could lead to some very serious litigation against the departments.

So the legal concern here is the fact that some criminal cases could be lost (and that would be a shame), but in addition peoples civil rights may be violated (that s wrong) and departments may be exposing themselves to un-necessary legal encounters all over trying to rush the training of a puppy by 4 to 8 months. It just doesn't make sense in the long run.

The people that run this program will always point at the alleged success of this program in seizures. My point would be that if the foundation is wrong, then the entire program is at risk of coming apart at the seams some day. In legal terms it comes under the fruit of the poison tree concept. I think there is a black cloud on the horizon for the people associated with this Texas K-9 Association program. This program has the potential of giving all k-9 drug dog handlers a black eye as a result.

I had one e-mail from a member stating that this Texas K-9 Association justifies the certification of puppies as drug dogs because it is funded by a grant from the Governors drug task force. My question would be "how much does the Governor even know about dog training and what is going on with this program?" Secondly, just because the Governors office funds this program does not mean that the program is positive, viable, or successfully meets its objectives. After all if the FBI lab can be found wanting, who says the puppy program funded by the Texas Governors office can't be poorly led.

I asked Mr. Grimmer to respond to this article. If there were things that I stated that were not correct I asked to be notified. He responded by e-mail stating the following point:

• The program will accept puppies from 8 week to 9 months of age.
• They are not allowed to return for certification until they have been home training for 8 weeks (minimum)
• He stated that even though the puppies are certified at 14, 16 or 20 weeks "MANY DOGS ARE STILL DEVELOPMENTAL, HOWEVER WITH CONTINUED TRAINING AND EXPERIENCE THEY BECOME FASTER, MORE ACCURATE AND THEREFORE BETTER DETECTOR DOGS THAN DOGS THAT BEGIN LATER IN LIFE."
• All animal psychologists will tell you the younger you begin training the better the results.
• He states that there is no physical stress involved in drug training that it is all a game.
• In my article I state that it is impossible to have a fully trained 14 week old narcotic detection dog. Mr. Grimmer's response was “AGREED BUT WE DO NOT HAVE A FULLY TRAINED DOG, RATHER A YOUNG ONE WITH A BETTER BASE IN TRAINING THAT CAN AND DOES DETECT THE PRESENCE OF DRUG.”
• He did not feel that comparing prey drive and defensive drive was a fair comparison. he wanted me to compare drug work to police tracking. He stated “YOUNG DOGS CAN PASS TD, TDX, AND SCHUTZHUND I TRACKS AS WELL AS SIMPLE POLICE TRACKS.”
• He stated that Marcus Cook has nothing to do with the program, except that he has seen the results and the dogs working and is impressed.
• His comment on the potential for a departmental law suit for improper training is there for adult dogs as well as with a puppy program.
• He indicated that dogs that have come from this program and been on the street for 5 years are still making busts and finding dope and have never been involved with litigation.

His response has not answered any on my concerns. In fact he has only confirmed many of my points.

• How can a dog be certified and have the program director agreeing that the dog is not fully trained. Obviously Mr. Grimmer has not been exposed to many trial lawyers that understand drug dog training. If he made the statement on the stand that "A dog is not fully trained but it has a good base for training" and the indication on that dog was used to obtain a search warrant. I will guarantee you that any good judge is going to toss the warrant and any contraband that was found as a result of that warrant.
• Mr. Grimmer is wrong if he feels that there is no physical stress to a working narcotic detection dog. When that dog is worked in an environment that it does not feel comfortable in (like a home with a few pit bulls that would like to eat it) this is stress. When a dog is worked on the interstate on a hot summer day with traffic flying by, this dog feels stress. When the dog is exposed to cutting agents and masking smells and corrected off of these smells it feels stress.

I would advise Mr. Grimmer not to make this statement on the wittiness stand if he has to testify in front of a good lawyer.

• As far as Mr. Cook is concerned, he is involved with this program if he knows what the program is all about and he is the president of the main agency that certifies these dogs. Mr. Cook does not have his head in the sand (or maybe he does). One of 2 things is happening here. He truly does not have the training experience to know what is going on or, he is turning a blind eye to a serious potential problem.

I wonder what Mr. Cook would say if some drug dealing scum that killed a cop got released because of faulty training on a dog that his organization certified.

• His comments on departmental law suits indicated a very clear under estimation of the real liability risks that this program is placing on departments that use these puppies to obtain search warrant s or where the puppies are used under the Carol Doctorine to search vehicles. Let a department lose a civil rights case as a result of this and then see where the lawyers go for money. This will open peoples eyes.
• I would say that the dogs that have been on the street for 5 years are probably now pretty good drug dogs. It was never my contention that this program could not be a great program. If these dogs were not certified until they were adults, then this would probably be the best drug training program in the country. But that is not what is happening and as a result it has the potential of giving every drug dog handler in the country a black eye in court.

Since this article was originally written, the puppy program was canceled by the Tarrant County Jr. College. If you would like to read more on this issue, I have written an update that you may find interesting. In addition, Marcus Cook seems to be under siege by members of his organization. They found out that when he organized the Texas K-9 Association, he did not set up a democratic system for electing officers. He appointed himself "President for Life." The members just found this out at their annual training seminar (which Cook did not attend).